Computer Quandary

I’ve got a bit of a decision to make soon and I’ll admit that it’s keeping me up at night.  No it’s not the presidential election, that one’s obvious for me. It’s also not Canon v. Nikon, as the 5DII has helped me on that count. Rather it’s a platform issue.

As I may have mentioned before, I’m not a Mac guy. That’s right, I’m a Windows user about 95% of the time. I like building my own machines a little too much. My current desktop is a 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad with 8 gigs of RAM and 5 hard drives. One 74GB Raptor boot drive, a
pair of 500GB drives in RAID 1 for general storage, and a pair of 1TB drives in RAID 1 for my photography. This whole thing runs 64bit Vista and it screams. Very fast, very stable, and very silent (just two 120mm fans on low voltage).

Interestingly enough, I was emailing with John Nack from the PhotoShop team a couple of months ago and I asked him the win/mac ratio of Photoshop sales and he said 70% Windows to 30% Mac.  And I’ve got to tell you, I was a little suprised. Sure, people use Photoshop for all kinds of things besides photography, but that’s a big number, which means there are a lot of photographers who use Windows.

Back when I went to music school it was all Macs in that industry too, and I stuck with Windows. There’s just something about Apple that pisses me off. Maybe it’s the smugness of too many of their ads. Maybe it’s the form over function much of the time. Maybe it’s the fact that even after you close all the windows of an application, the application is still running. And it drives me nuts that they’re a company that gets blowjobs from the mainstream press but rarely gets called on it’s failures (Proprietarty ADC display ports?, The fact that they never document what they’ve changed in software updates “Misc bug and performance improvements”, Hyper-inflated battery-life quotes, No MMS on the iPhone? Come on!)

It’s definitely Mac users who think that you’ve got to use a Mac if you’re doing photography, but who have no idea how their machine works and think that the guts inside are different than any other computer (‘My mac has a sad face today, I’ve got to bring it in to get it fixed’). Hey lady, it’s not a pet, it’s a computer. I had a hard drive problem a month ago and a Steve Jobs ass kissing friend of mine said snidely, “You know, that wouldn’t have happened if you had a Mac!”  Well, first off, it was the hard drive in my Macbook Pro that died, so up your nose with a rubber hose and secondly, the drive was made my Hitachi, which also makes drives used in computers of every brand. It’s the same stuff inside, especially with Apple’s move to Intel a couple years ago. Ya, that’s another good one, for years they portrayed x86 processors as slow and stupid compared to their PowerPC’s, then they to and switch without ever having to eat their words, but I digress.

Now, as I just mentioned, I do own a Macbook Pro from about 2 years ago that I use when I travel, but I only bought that because I don’t know of any comparable machines that are as compact with as good a screen on the Windows side. Even with 4GB of RAM and a 7200RPM drive in it, it’s no match for the 400MB PSD files my work ends up creating.

So here I am, a desktop Vista user with a Mac laptop for travel.  So what’s the problem?  Well, a couple of things. I’ve got an approaching storage problem that needs a long term solution. Unfortunately most of the external drive enclosures with RAID support just bridge the SATA connections together to get it to your PC where you create the RAID sets in software. So if I go that route, which is currently heavily favored, I need to decide on a platform because the drives will end up being platform specific. Second, I’ve had these machines for about two years and while there’s nothing WRONG with them, Intel is releasing it’s next generation of chips in the next month or so, and Apple looks to be replacing it’s laptops on Tues. And with big big files, every cycle counts so I’ll be upgrading sooner rather than later.

In the past few months I’m getting to the point where I use my computer basically for 4 things. Firefox (email), LightRoom, Photoshop, and watching movies. Obviously I can do all of this on either platform. Photoshop CS4 ads an application frame to the mac, which fixes my pet peave that the desktop is visible underneath the files you have open and clicking on it by accident takes you back to Finder. Though CS4 is also 64bit on Windows and not on the Mac, which means more available RAM. One thing I would miss is Qimage which I love and use to print my images. I’ve never been able to get decent color out of Lightroom or Photoshop even when I turn off all of their color management and let my HP printer driver handle everything, settings which give me perfect prints in Qimage.  I guess that I could use boot camp or parallels to print, but that sounds like a pain. And while I’ve got my laptop talking to my desktop through SMB file sharing, it never seems quite as seemless as two machines on the same platform

My pie-in-the-sky dream is a really fast Macbook Pro with an ExpressCard eSATA adapter hooked up to a 4TB external RAID set and a 30″ NEC monitor.  That way, I’ve got the best of both worlds, big screen and fast hard drives along with a lower pwer consumption and the ablity to disconnect and take my main machine anywhere. But I don’t think this next generation will be quite fast enough for that.  I’ve grown fond of 4 cores when converting RAW images to DNG.

So I’ll probably end up with a new Mac laptop and a new desktop.  The question is if I should wait for the new Mac Pro and get one of those? Or just do what I’ve always done and build a sweet new quad core machine in the next couple months, for about one half what I would pay for an inferiorly speced Mac.  Decisions, decisions.

Comments welcomed, but I’ve got one esoteric Mac RAID question for anyone out there who could answer.  If I create an eSATA software RAID set on one Mac, say a desktop, and then plug it into another Mac, say a macbook with an eSATA port; Will it mount and work seamlessly?  Would I for example be able to have my laptop on a shoot, take 50GB of photos, come home, plug in the RAID to the laptop, copy the files, unmount it and mount it back to the desktop to do my post work?

Misc Tues Stuff

– Timothy Armes wrote an export plug-in for Lightroom called ‘LR Mogrify’ based on ImageMagick that is certainly interesting, and may even give better results (certainly more options) than the Adobe one that’s built in.  Free to use for 10 images at an export, unlimited if you donate (I did).  You can read about/download here.  Thanks to Erik for sending me a heads-up via email.

– Looked at my hard drives today, and my main 1TB photo array is getting up there.. about 150GB free.  Time to start planing a real answer to that storage issue I discussed a while back.  I’m seriously thinking about a 4 drive external SATA array. Maybe RAID 0+1.

– Also looking to replace my fantastic Eizo CE240W monitor with a 30″ and I’m looking at the NEC 3090.  Working with these 21MP images needs a lot of real estate, and the portrait mode might actually be fantastic for this particular use.  If anyone has any thoughts on the NEC or is interested in buying my Eizo when I switch.  Let me know.

– I currently use a small Wacom tablet (4×6″) and need to upgrade because I’ve tried it with a 30″ display and it’s too small to control well. I was thinking about the 6×11″ if anyone has any thoughts on the ‘widescreen’ tablets pros and cons.

– Doing commercial work is great except that you’ve got to wait MONTHS to get paid, which is infuriating and stressing me out.  Everyone needs their photos TODAY but god forbid they pay you in a timely manner.  It’s just a respect thing, or lack thereof.

Quality, Part 1

I’ve written before about different cameras and different systems and film vs digital and all that nuts and bolts stuff. Most of the time when people are discussing differences, they’re either talking out their ass or they’ve got something to sell you, or both.

However, tonight I went back and rescanned an image I took on with my Hasselblad a couple years ago.  Really grainy 3200 speed Ilford b/w film, not even focused that well. And I’ve got to tell you, there’s something about it, the bokeh is just incredible. The whole image is just creamy in a way that I don’t get with 35mm digital, and I don’t know what to do about it.

Don’t get me wrong, the amount of information in my 1Ds3 files is super, and when I get a 5DII in a few weeks it’ll be even better, but it seems like the issue is in the path the light takes to get to the film/sensor and I don’t think that the lenses I have are doing what I want.  They’re good lenses, I know.  And only crappy golfers blame their clubs, I know.  But I’m feeling limited.  When I finally get paid for the ad job I did in August I’m going to do some shopping.  I’m going to try the fast Canon L primes.  Probably the 35/1.4, 50/1.2, and 85/1.2  Though I MAY wait for the Zeiss ZE lenses which have been announced, though I worry that a 35mm viewfinder isn’t quite big enough to manually focus fast enough at large apertures.

Ok, back to quality.  Lately I’ve been doing a lot of processing to my images. See the first section of images on billwadman.com to see what I’m talking about.  It’s fine, and I like the feeling they get because of it, but it’s a crutch. I feel like it’s a serious crutch and holding me back from getting better, so I’m going to put that formula aside for a bit.  I’m going to work toward getting better lighting when I shoot, and creating depth in my photos through precision and composition and not by fiddling with a Wacom pen.

Robert Pirsig has written alot about Quality in ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ (my favorite book). Basically, one of his thoughts is that things have an innate quality that is there even before you’re aware of that they exist.  That some things are just of higher quality than others regardless of opinion post interaction.  I’ve spent a lot of time lately, trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. And the best I can come up with so far as that I want to create things with Quality.  Tomorrow I think I’ll go out and shoot a roll in the Hasselblad and see what comes out.  

Canon 5D Mark II – My thoughts

Yesterday Canon finally announced their replacement for the now 3 year old (that’s 108 digital camera years) 5D SLR. In a few ways, I miss using my 5D.  It’s small, light, and has excellent image quality. So as someone who shot over 120,000 frames with a 5D and used it as my main body until very recently, I’ve been eagerly awaiting this news and have some thoughts I thought I’d share with you.

First off, the good stuff.  21MP is super, though at less than 3 grand I’m a little pissed I just bought a 1DsIII. Higher ISO speeds and better high-ISO performance, looks pretty good so far, though I’m a detail guy and find the noise reduction necessary at these levels tends to mush detail a little too much for my liking. High-res screen, super and I wish I had it on my flagship 1D.  1080P video mode, honestly couldn’t care less as I don’t shoot video, though I guess this would be useful to photo-journalists.

Now for the bad.  Same or very similar AF system to the old 5D, hmm.. well I rarely use anything but the center focus point and almost all of my subjects are still, that said, I kind of wanted a pro AF system in a smaller package or at least a really substantial upgrade.  The new viewfinder is slightly larger at 98%, thought we’ll see if the 5DII’s is actually an improvement on what was a very good but not incredible finder on the original. I’ve become a little addicted to the 100% finder on the 1D.

But the main thing that’s stopping me from pre-ordering one right now is the shutter.  Supposedly it’s the same as the old camera.  While 3 or 4 frames per second is fine for me as I never shoot in anything other than single frames, the blackout time on the 5D can simply be described as glacial.  Seriously, it’s like 150ms or something.  I think my 40 year old Hasselblad is faster.  We’ll see I guess, maybe it’s better than I think or maybe I can get over it.

Oh, and I’m not sure why everyone is always complaining about the lack of environmental sealing in these non-pro bodies.  I’ve used my Canon cameras in mild rain tons of times and had no problem.  You’d think that everyone on DP Review was shooting on a sandy beach during a huricane the way they talk.

Style

I’ll be honest, I’m not much of a fashion hound, I’m not even a fashion golden retreiver. I generally wear pretty boring clothes, hate shopping, and get a bit angry when people say things like, “Oh, blue is in this season”. Oh really?  And who exactly decided that blue is in this season?

Over the past year, I’ve fallen into a groove with my portraits.  They’ve started to feel a cohesive set to me, and also, I think, somewhat recognizable as having been taken by me.  Some of it has to do with my framing, and the focal length lenses I like to use, and of course my post-processing. And some have said that I’m able to cultivate a certain kind of portrait from my subjects, though that sounds a little new-age for my liking.

As a general rule I think all of this is a positive thing, because it makes my work more recognizable and perhaps memorable, which will hopefully lead to the all important, more work. But I’m not sure if the groove is not just as much of a trap. I mean, I ‘think’ that this look was organic and just came about, which would be a good thing, but did I subconsciencely choose for it to happen because I felt the look of my portraits was too scattered. And then the question remain, is having “a look” in the first place really a good thing?

There are many portrait photographers who’s works is quickly recognizable. Annie Lebovitz has a look, Platon definately has a look, Seliger to a certain extent, Greenfield-Sanders most certainly.  I once told a big-dog I know that I was scared of getting pidgeon-holed to which they replied something like, “It’s better to be pidgeon-holed and working than not”. Which is a good point; None of the above photographers seems to be for want of work.

Then of course there is the issue of what’s cool, as what’s cool is what sells. And I’m pretty sure my pictures are not cool.  Last year I entered in a competition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, and while a couple of my images made it to the last round of 150 out of about 6000, none of them were selected for the show.  Of the images that were, some were absolutely gorgeous, and others, in my opinion, absolutely god-awful. Most of the stuff I didn’t like was of the flat light, dirty, seemingly poor person with a blank look on their face kind of stuff which I think was in vogue last year. Most of the stuff I did like was dramatically lit and looked like a painting. Which is good because my images tend toward more dramatic lighting and painterly look.

The thing is, that I don’t like to be comfortable.  In fact, I’m uncomfortable being comfortable if that makes any sense. So while with one foot I feel like I’m hitting my stride, with the other I question greatly the path the stride is taking.  Maybe it’s just fear of regret, or of screwing up, or of becoming static.  I’ll admit that I’m at my best when I’m changing, when I’m dynamic.

I talked all this over with my friends Craig, Lisa, and Mary Beth. A typographer, a photographer, and a writer.  Basically the conclusion we came to is that you may need to make certain concessions of stability to the commercial gods, so they know what they’re going to get when they hire you, which is fine as long as you continue to grow on the side. And not in a every once in a while I mess around way, but rather all the time.  The trick on this balancing act is to not teeter too far toward either side.  

So basically I need to come with some ways to expand my creative horizons a bit, so if anyone is in the NYC area, wants to take some pictures, and will allow me the time to experiment: Let me know.

PhotoFolio – the next life stage

Almost 5 years ago, I was doing a lot of Flash development work and taking pictures on the side, and I wanted to write a little flash app that would let me stick a bunch of images in a folder and have a nice little gui for people to view them on my site.  A couple nights of work and what became Photofolio was born.

Once I got to version 2 and added thumbnail support, I posted a version on my site and let people download it for their own use. I figured that if I found it useful, maybe other people would as well. In fact, for a while I used photofolio as the basis for my online portfolio. That is until so many other people did so that I had to start custom coding new looks to differentiate myself.  <grin>

Well it took on a life of it’s own and as of today I was up to version 6 with all kinds of neat doodads and customization and such.  However, I haven’t had the time to add the features that people have been asking for, and I wanted to keep the source code under wraps with the fantasy of turning it into a real product one day, not just donation-ware. So I’ve decided that starting today, anyone who has paid for photofolio in the past, or donates in the future, can also download the source code to customize as the see fit.

This is pretty sad for me because I started Photofolio when my father was still alive and remember working on it up in CT for the months that we sat around while he was sick.  It’s also sad to see the end of something, though you could also look at it as the beginning of something new.

Here’s what I posted on the photofolio.us site:

OK, big news here. Since
I don’t have the time maintain PhotoFolio the way I’d like, and since
all of my users are such supportive people, and since life is short:
I’ve decided to release the source code .fla files for the latest
version of PhotoFolio to all of those people who have, or will in the
future, donate to the cause. So if you’ve bought a Photofolio license
in the past, you can log in using the download information I emailed to
you, and grab the zip file.

Since
the reason I’m doing this is because I have no time, I won’t be able to
support the source code at all, but I think my work is fairly clean so
Flash geek among you should find is useful. Also, any further money
that I receive from PhotoFolio donations will be send to the wonderful
AndreaB, who has run the PhotoFolio support forums out of the goodness
of her heart. So please continue donating.

This
is a bit of a melancholy decision for me, certainly marking the end of
a small era in my life. Please do good stuff with it, and thank you for
your support all these years.

-Bill Wadman

Portfolios

It’s the distilled culmination of a photographers work; a collection of their best images, their ‘book’. But how do you choose what photographs you include? And in what format? I’ve spent some time thinking about all this and thought I’d share my thoughts.

First off, the physical decisions. How big do you want/need your images to be. This depends on the style of your work to some extent, as a landscape photographers stuff probably won’t look best at 8.5×11″. Some people have these books which have hard
cases which latch and strap and fold like some kind of matryoshka doll. To my mind, unless your book is really getting messengered around every day, that sort of external vault feels like you’re compensating for the work inside. I chose a soft
leather covered Pina Zengaro book which I picked up at Sam Flax. It’s pages are held by posts, so it’s expandable to however
many pages you need. And I went with 11×14″ for paper size. Because I shoot environmental portraits, I feel like a larger print
gives a better representation of the images, regardless of the fact that most editorial use of them would be smaller than that.

As for paper and borders, I’ve been printing on Red River Arctic Polar Satin with the image centered inside 9×11″. Therefore,
they don’t take up the whole page and feel more like fine art prints. There are those who say that full bleed works better or
is more in style, but I say that trends change and while my look may not be “cool” now, my book will look classic and hopefully
never passe. Plus as much of my work is in the 3×2 ratio of 35mm, there really isn’t a paper I could use to go full bleed
without cropping the image way too much for my liking. Maybe 11×17″ but that’s a wierd size for someone to be looking at, and
if there is a landscape image, then the viewer would have to rotate the whole book. Yuck.

However all of this is circumstantial to the real question of which images to include. Not all of my images have the same feel. In fact, a few of my favorite images don’t look like my work at all (maybe that’s something I should discuss with a therapist). It seems that everyone has different opinions on this topic. I’ve spoken to other photographers, to art buyers, to magazine editors, to gallery owners, and to muggles. Some say to include your best work, some say to include your favorite work. While I think these people meant the same thing, I think there is a subtle but important difference between your ‘best’ and you ‘favorite’ images. Then others will tell me that it’s too eclectic a collection and that I should choose one ‘look’ and have a book just of that. For example, choose one section of my billwadman.com site and create the book around it. They say that editors and buyers want consistancy. They want to know that when you hire Bill you get X. I once asked a big photographer friend of mine about my fear of getting pidgeon holed into a look, to which he said that getting pideon-holed and working is better than better than not.

Because so many people have differing opinions, I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re all just opions and that there is no right answer. Or rather the right answer is that your book should contain the images you want it to contain and to hell with the way the viewer interprets that. You have no control over them anyway. Maybe the person you hand it to will pass you over because they think your consistancy shows lack of range. Or maybe they’re looking for something specific and think you’re too unpredictable. I’ve met both on both ends of the spectrum.

I’m currently reworking my book and am ending up somewhere between the two extremes. I have no real problem with an image looking a bit out of place. Yet as time goes by my images are settling more and more into a consistant look all by themselves, and maybe that’s a good thing, Maybe it’s saying something about my maturity as an artist or something. Funny thing is that I was happy with my book last time I updated it a few months ago, but now I look through and can’t believe I let people see half the images in there. Yuck!

Ok, back to obssessing.

Done. And some shots of Owen.

I’m back, and done.

4 days of shooting, 24 people from 3 orchestras, at 3 locations, with over 3000 images to show for it.  It was a marathon, but in the end I’d say it went about as well as it could possibly have.  Everyone got along, everything went smoothly. Couldn’t have done it without my producer Marlene, Meg my assistant, and PA’s James and Kevin. As well as Jennifer, Carlos, Larissa, and everyone else at the agency. <cue applause>

At the end of day 3, I shot a cello player from the BSO named Owen Young. He was such a nice guy that when were done I pulled him over to a window, picked up the backup body and snapped off a dozen frames just for me.  Three of those shots are below.

A Quick Update – my back hurts

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. I was away with the family last weekend and now I’m in the middle of a multi-day job. I figured that I’d give you an update and let you in on how it’s going.

So, yesterday I had the first shooting day of a four day shoot for an advertising campaign I’m working on. I’m shooting musicians on a green screen, which is fun, and I must say that if they’re all like the 6 I shot yesterday this whole process is going to be a really nice experience. Everyone, especially the players who flew into NYC for this, were great. That said, I’m exhausted, or rather I was when I got home yesterday about 12 hours after I left in the morning. Standing and talking and shooting for hours on end while trying to keep your attention at 100% is really draining, and I don’t like coffee so I don’t have that little crutch. Plus my back is screaming at me.  Time to load up on ibuprofen. Better still, later this afternoon I’ve got to get in a car to drive for 3.5 hours to get to the next location for tomorrow.

I’m shooting tethered with a 1DsIII to a macbook pro, Canon remote software with Lightroom picking up the RAW files automatically as they’re dropped onto the hard drive. It takes about 10 seconds for each 22MB RAW image to transfer and show up which is a little annoying, but it’s certainly a more instant feedback than film would be and at least you get to see the image on the screen. I’ve heard that the camera to computer transfer time is much faster on a windows box (which I usually use), something to do with inefficient USB drivers in OSX. I went to go use bootcamp to install vista and try to get that boost, but the DVD drive on the macbook pro won’t read half the disks I insert, so I guess I’m stuck on this gig.

I’ve shot about 100+ images or so of each person. Trying to come up with and capture interesting ‘poses’ or expresions which will be useful in the post production phase of the process. My big thing is trying to make it a comfortable experience for the subjects because that’s how I get a portrait of that person and now just a picture of some guy playing violin. To that end, I like to keep it largely one-on-one, with the clients and other gaggle of agency people and the like not right there watching while I shoot. I’m happy to show them work at intervals, but this is a case of where too many cooks really does spoil things. Makes the subject feel like they’re on trial.

After everyone (the client team, art director, me, and anyone else who happens to want to weigh in) is happy with the images from each subject, my assistant copies the RAW onto a couple external drives just in case all hell breaks loose. BTW, I needed a couple drives for the shoot and so went to techserve the other day and picked up a couple 250GB Lacie Little Disk drives for $139 a piece. Not the cheapest for bus powered little drives, but they’re bost USB2 and Firewire which we’ve found is substantially faster for this kind of thing.

Most of them are wearing black, so I’m exposing to the right when I can to try to minimize the amount of noise in the material and shadows, and then pulling back the exposure a half a stop or so in Lightroom. It seems to be working. Unfortunately most of the men are also wearing white shirts which means I’ve got to be careful not to blow out the highlights on the other end of the spectrum.

That’s about it for now, but I’ll come back with more tales of the shoot tomorrow.
We’ll be back to regular posts and programming soon enough.

From 5D to 1DsMkIII: The double-edged sword and mini-review

I’ve now spend a couple of weeks shooting with my new 1Ds and thought it was about time that I gave some insight into the transition from my 5D to the 1Ds3. I’ve mostly shot with primes (28, 50, and 100mm) though the 24-70 zoom has also done very well. At least with the primes I don’t feel like the lenses are limiting the sensor at all, especially when they’re stopped down a bit.

Let’s get some of the obvious stuff out of the way first. The 1Ds is bigger and heavier
than the 5D, and by a decent margin. It’s not heavy like a Mamiya RZ67, but it’s not
the camera I’d want to carry around all day with a heavy L zoom while sightseeing in
Paris. The files it produces are obviously much bigger as well, so hard disk space gets eaten up twice as fast. I’ve started being a little more stingy with my RAW files,
keeping only the ones I know I’ll actually use, versus another 50% more that I used to
think I’d get around to processing but rarely if ever did.

As for the RAW files, they’re great. Resolution, with a good lens and technique, is
stunning as I’ve noted a couple weeks ago with the boring and ugly leaf example. There is an
improvement in the malleability of the RAW data, but honestly, not as much as I thought
there would be, at least on the highlight end of the spectrum. There is however room to
pull up shadows without much noise, especially at low ISO. As with most digital
systems, under-exposing is generally a better idea as the clipped highlights kill ya.
That said, the highlight to white transitions are much less jarring, with plenty of
data to pull back with the highlight slider in Lightroom. I’m caulking this up to the 14bit files.

While there is more detail overall, I think the greatest use of the glut of information
is to give the image noticably more texture, at least to to my eyes. They feel less
‘digital’ (that being the negative plastic look that people complain about) that the
files from my 5D and I’ve also noticed the images need less post production overall, seeming to have more character right out of the camera.

Noise levels are very good, I’d say about the same as my 5D, which was pretty good as well. I’m not a sports shooter so I don’t need 1/500th of a second at iso 12000, but I
regularly shoot at 800 and 1600 and have no problems to speak of. Plus remember that
with that many pixels, you can theoretically use extra noise reduction then down sample
and sharpen and end up with a 12MP image that’s really low noise. I have had no need to
do this though, so it’s just conjecture. ISO 100 shots do seem to have a little more randomness to patches of color (a blue sky for example). You could call this noise I guess, but I think it’s a good thing because it’s very subtle and makes the images feel much more like really good film scans. It’s much like dither in a digital audio recording if you have any experience with that.

The shutter is fast and tight, mirror blackout minimal. None of that gets in your way.
And the viewfinder is butter and probably my favorite part of the new camera and the
hardest thing to go backward on. It’s big enough to actually manually focus with. Even the 5D finder feels small in comparison, I can’t imagine what the step back to a rebel would be like.
After using the 1Ds for a couple weeks I wanted to test some tethered shooting
scenarios using Capture One and so picked up the 5D body for the first time when I hit a snag. And wow,
in comparison, the 5D feels really tiny and something akin to a toy. Not that it is or
doesn’t take great photographs, that’s just the visceral first reaction. I also like the idea that there are no dummie modes or anything on the camera. That you’re average person would have no idea what any of the buttons do (I’ll admit to being a bit of an elitist in that way)

If they could fit the 1Ds sensor and viewfinder in a 5D size body, that would probably
be my ideal camera. But that’s not really an option, so I’ll take the trade-off. As of right now, I’m much less likely to pick up my Hasselblad if I want to take high-end images, the files I get out of the new camera are more than a match for medium format scans to my eye. Much more so than the 5D.

If anyone has any specific questions, I’d be more than happy to answer.